Several publications and online communities were simultaneously talking about the mass failure of SanDisk external SSDs. The brand’s owner, Western Digital, previously announced a firmware release that should fix the problem, but portable storage device crashes continue to be reported. And the discs are sold at a discount of up to 70%.
Image source: westerndigital.com
A striking example is the story of a journalist The edge Vjeran Pavic who lost data due to SanDisk Extreme Pro 3TB failure. The problem is that it wasn’t an old long life drive, it was a copy sent by the manufacturer to replace the old one that also failed. SanDisk owner Western Digital recently released firmware updates for the 2TB and 4TB SanDisk Extreme V2 and Extreme Pro V2 models, but the issue has not been resolved and has spread to a wider range of models.
One of the employees PetaPixels discovered that the SanDisk Pro G40 drive, bought just a month ago, stopped working with the DaVinci Resolve video editor – he tried to work on another computer, but the problem only disappeared after the external SSD was disconnected became. As a result, the entire editorial team of the resource abandoned products under the SanDisk brand. One of the users Reddit I noticed that the problem was widespread when SanDisk portable drives were sold at a discount a few months ago.
The situation looks particularly suspicious when it comes to discounts, because if the series is known to have so many problems, why doesn’t the manufacturer withdraw the devices from sale and further reduce prices? It’s one thing for a company to try to get rid of inventory, but if SanDisk does so knowingly, it could be illegal. The journalist Vieran Pavic mentioned above updated the firmware of his drive, but the device still failed. At the same time, Western Digital does not give clear answers to questions about the incident, which only increases suspicion.
Even if you take into account the statistics regularly published by cloud provider Backblaze, the situation seems unusual: its data shows that, firstly, the failure rate of Western Digital drives is below the average failure rate, and secondly, SSDs are more reliable than HDDs.
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